The Geobook and other Geos platforms

This section is mainly intended for users of other Geos platoforms (for example, Geoworks Ensemble or New Deal Office) who also own a GeoBook, or for people who want to run Geos applications which do not contain GeoBook-specific instructions.

Accessing system files

[Thanks to Jürgen Heinisch from the Geos User Club for this idea.]

Most of the operating system files and libraries on the GeoBook are stored in a compressed ROM-based file system, which is normally not visible from either DOS mode or the File Manager. If for some reason you want to examine these files anyway, you can copy the GeoManager application from the Geoworks Ensemble package to a disk and run it from the built-in file manager.

The old GeoManager will show all the files on the device, even though most of them will have their names underlined to indicate that they do not reside on the "main" Geos drive, in our case drive F. Anyway, you can still view and copy them like any other file (remembering of course that all the files in the GeoBook ROM are copyrighted software).

Running applications and Book Reader books on disks

One characteristic of Geos is that it has fairly strict rules on where files belonging to an application (like libraries, help files or parts of a Book Reader document) have to be placed in the directory tree.

For this reason, if you want to run an application that consists of multiple files from floppy disk (as opposed to copying them into the \GEOWORKS directory on drive F), you will have to create a proper Geos directory tree on the disk and place the files into the appropriate subdirectories, just as the instructions for the program tell you for hard disk installation: 

   A:
      \GEOWORKS
         \WORLD
         \SYSTEM
         \USERDATA
         \PRIVDATA
You will only have to create directories which actually contain files.

Running Geos installation programs

When using a self-extracting installation program for an Geos application, you may run into a situation where the installer runs without reporting any errors, but the application still does not appear in the File Manager.

In this case, you should go to the DOS prompt and check whether the files have been copied to drive D (the RAM disk) rather than drive F. Note that the name of the Geos directory on drive D is \GEOS and not \GEOWORKS as on drive F. You can then copy the newly installed files (usually found in \GEOS\WORLD and \GEOS\SYSTEM) to the corresponding directories on drive F or on a floppy disk manually by using DOS commands.

Installing new fonts

[by Kelly Bergen]

Ensemble/NewDeal Fonts can be added to the USERDATA\FONT directory on drive F and run on Geobook applications. Using a thicker bigger font can sometimes make the Web browser text easier to read.

[back to main page] [mgroeber@gmx.net]